Designing the Language Experience of the User Interface

When you think about
any user interface (UI) guideline and you hear “language of the user,” what do you
think?

I should be able to
understand the words I see on the UI.

The words I see on
the UI should be meaningful to the work that I do.

The words I see on the UI should be translatable
and localizable.

The usability of business
applications has evolved, and business applications have become more
consumer-focused. The average user’s understanding of business applications has
evolved as well. Technology and know-how now allow us to build contextual user
experiences into applications and to design language experiences for the UI—with
style, tone, terms, words, and phrases—that resonate with real users and their real,
every day work experiences in the real world, across the globe.

For example, on the
Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud My Details page, notice how the sections
are organized, how they use real-world terms in headings and field labels, and how
they use real content, such as personal and biographical details instead of
placeholder text, which cannot be evaluated for its meaning or translation or
localization needs.

Choosing which terms,
words, and phrases to include on the UI is as important as choosing the right
terms to use in code. In code and on the UI, the terms and words should be
accurate in context and enable the successful completion of a task in context,
whether the context is the processing of an event in the code or the user
adding information to a contact record on a form in the UI.

37signals book, Getting Real, dedicates a short essay, Copywriting
is Interface Design, to the importance of copywriting in UI design and how
important every single word choice on is for the UI.

There are also
numerous resources that support that choosing terms, words, and phrases for the
UI that accurately represent real-world concepts in their source language often
enables the translation and localization experiences. For examples, see Ultan Ó
Broin’s Blogos entry Working Out
Context in the Enterprise: Localize That! and Verónica González de la Rosa
and Antoine Lefeuvre’s slideshare ‘Translation is UX’ Manifesto.

So how do we design a
rich, context-aware UI language experience for today’s user?

We use accurate terms
to represent concepts that are well-established in the real world by real
users. These are the terms that users use frequently, terms such as team or shopping cart.

We use terms
consistently to represent the same concepts across applications. We wouldn’t
use location in one place and party site in another to represent the
same concept, or save and submit to represent the same concept.

When we need to use
these terms in context of phrases on the UI, we do so with a style and tone
that resonates with users and yet is still translatable and localizable. This
means that we don’t introduce nonsensical words or instant messaging-speak. We
offer phrasing that is simple and clear: Add
a new customer record.

We stop surfacing the
language of the application on the UI, for example, code-specific terms. When
we use a term like worker in the code
as an abstraction or a superclass to represent the concept that a person can
assume the role of “employee” or “contractor” in the system, this use makes
sense in context of where and how it is used in code. When we surface the term worker on the UI to represent either or
both roles, we introduce a context-independent use of this concept and one that
when tested, we learn is not necessarily translatable or localizable in such a context.

Jakob Nielsen in his 1995
article 10
Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design identified a need for this
practice of using language choices that resonate with real users: “The system should speak the users' language,
with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than
system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear
in a natural and logical order.”

A simplified UI is simple
to build, simple to extend, and simple to use. Use and context awareness
require us to build applications that focus equally on code, visual design, and
language (UI) design. Every page that we surface to the user should make sense
to the user in context of his work and the real world. The practice of
designing the language that is used on the UI offers us an extraordinary
opportunity to evolve how we communicate with users to enable their work
everywhere.